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Tether Leads $5.2 Million Seed in Ark Labs to Bring Programmable Payments to Bitcoin

The funding backs Arkade, an off‑chain layer adding payment primitives—authorization, escrow, conditional spending, merchant holds—on Bitcoin.

Overview

  • Ark Labs raised $5.2 million in a round led by Tether with participants including Anchorage Digital, Ego Death Capital, Epoch VC, Lion26, Sats Ventures, Contribution Capital and angels, lifting total institutional funding to about $7.7 million.
  • The company said the capital will expand engineering, developer relations and tooling while onboarding partners building payments, lending and digital asset services on Bitcoin via Arkade.
  • Ark Labs introduced stablecoin and digital asset support on Arkade, positioning the platform for issuing, transferring and settling tokenized assets using Bitcoin rails.
  • Arkade executes transactions off-chain using virtualized transaction outputs (VTXOs) for scalability and privacy, with pre-signed on-chain transactions as a fail-safe if the server goes offline.
  • Tether signaled interest in expanding Bitcoin-native stablecoin infrastructure but has not committed to issuing USDT on Arkade, and Anchorage’s involvement was highlighted as potential regulated support in the U.S.